16 landing page checks a machine can do. And 4 it cannot.

Measurable

1. 01

   A headline exists, and it is one headline

   No <h1> means no clear statement of what the page is. Several <h1> means none of them wins. Past ten words, it stops being read in the five seconds you get.

2. 02

   The headline is not a copy of the title tag

   They are read in different places, by different people. Using the same sentence twice wastes one of them.

3. 03

   Something on the page reads like an action

   A link or button whose words start with a verb: start, try, get, book, buy. If nothing does, the page is a brochure.

4. 04

   There are not too many actions

   Past six different calls to action, the visitor picks none. One primary action, one secondary, the rest in the footer.

5. 05

   The action exists in the served HTML

   If the button only appears after JavaScript runs, crawlers, link previews and slow phones see a page with nothing to do.

6. 06

   A title tag under 65 characters

   Google cuts around 60. Anything after that is decoration.

7. 07

   A meta description

   Without one, search engines and chat apps pick a random sentence from your page. That sentence is rarely your best.

8. 08

   A share image (og:image)

   Without it, every link to your page on X, LinkedIn, Slack or Discord shows as bare text next to posts with pictures. For a product that grows by being shared, this is the loop leaking at step one.

9. 09

   A viewport meta tag

   Without it, phones render a zoomed-out desktop page. More than half your visitors, gone in a second.

10. 10

    A declared language

    Screen readers and translation tools stop guessing.

11. 11

    A favicon

    A blank tab icon is what an unfinished page looks like.

12. 12

    A canonical link

    The same page reached with ?ref= and ?utm= counts as several pages otherwise.

13. 13

    HTTPS, and no http resources inside

    One image loaded over plain http is enough for a browser to flag the whole page.

14. 14

    Reasonable weight and script count

    Heavy HTML and fifteen external scripts delay the first screen. On a phone on mobile data, that delay is the whole visit.

15. 15

    Images have alt text

    It is how people using a screen reader, and search engines, know what the picture shows.

16. 16

    Proof and price are mentioned somewhere

    A page with no testimonial, no customer name and no price asks a stranger to trust and to guess at the same time.

Not measurable

1. Whether a stranger understands what you sell

   A machine sees a headline. It does not know whether "the all-in-one workspace" means anything to the person who came from a search about invoices.

2. Whether they believe you

   Numbers you cannot have yet, a testimonial with no name, a claim with no mechanism: each one is read as a lie, and the rest of the page pays for it.

3. What the page fails to say

   The missing sentence is invisible to a parser. It is usually who this is for, what happens after the click, or what it costs.

4. Whether the words are worth the space they take

   Rewriting a headline so it names the job instead of the category is judgement, not measurement.